Embedded systems often use various protection mechanisms to protect the data being processed by the embedded system from unauthorized access. To illustrate, multimedia embedded systems often utilize authentication, encryption, and watermarking to prevent unauthorized access to the multimedia data being processed. Unauthorized entities frequently attempt to gain access to the data by attacking the underpinning operation of the embedded system. Oftentimes, an embedded system is particularly vulnerable to such attacks during its initialization phase (also known as “boot up”), and thus an attacker may attempt to hijack operation of the embedded system during the initialization phase, either by introducing fraudulent boot code so that the embedded system boots in a manner that provides unimpeded access to the multimedia data, or by disabling access mechanisms that otherwise prevent access to memory associated with the embedded system, and thus enabling the attacker to access the multimedia data via the memory or to access the code implementing one or more of the protection mechanisms.